Runester

Snow is doing fine. Right from the day I brought her home from the vet (the day after her surgery) she has been active and apparently comfortable. The scar looks pretty bad and has half a dozen stitches and another half dozen staples; but she moves around, climbs up and down the stairs, get’s on and off the bed, etc. In fact, the only time I was able to detect any discomfort at all is when I applied the antibiotic ointment to her scar - I figure it may have stung.

She’s been getting two doses of Amoxycillin every day, one in the morning and one in the evening. In fact, in order to keep her doses up, I’ve stayed home this weekend and my poor gf is alone. [She probably enjoys the break, I am a bit much - but the evening can get lonely for both of us.]

On another topic entirely …

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It’s interesting and frustrating to note what I can’t note in this blog. The readership can probably be counted on one hand with fingers to spare - and yet some topics have the potential to stir up trouble or hurt feelings, and of those that I know. I suppose I’d need to keep some second, secret blog for those topics; such that those close to me, the very ones I care about the most, wouldn’t be harmed or offended by what I write. On the other hand, it’s challenging enough to update one blog on a semi-regular basis, having to maintain two is just too much.

Shape Shifters

One of the staples of science fiction as well as fantasy genre stories are the Shape Shifters. In fantasy they are usually sorcerers who have aquired the ability or werewolves who have been cursed with a limited version of it. The ones that interest me the most are the Sci-Fi version, often an alien race with the intrinsic ability to change their shape. The issue that has fascinated and frustrated me for years is the insistance that they have some ‘true’ shape, and the hero often tries to force the shape shifter back into. In the fantasy setting, I guess that makes sense; in the sci-fi setting … why should there be a first shape? Why does there have to be a ‘true’ shape and everything else is a mimic cover? The only time I’ve ever seen this handled well (or right, in my opinion) was the Founders of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In their ‘true’ shape they were a liquid. Completely ’shapeless’, or taking the shape of whatever container they were in. Their entire homeworld was a vast ocean - a liquid covered planet in which the liquid was the race of aliens, themselves.

We change shape, have ‘faces’ or ‘masks’ that we employ at different times and for different purposes. One face for work, another for home, another for church. One when we feel we are in authority, another when we are submissive, and even one for trying to wheedle our way with someone. But, there has always been the belief that under all of the pretext is our true face. What if we have no true face? What if we are born ‘liquid’, utterly malleable to our surroundings, and needing to be in order to survive? What if, under all those masks and false fronts … is nothing at all? Maybe those dreamy hippies and neo-hippies that go off to ‘find themselves’ and ‘get in touch with their inner nature’ are actually dancing on the edge of the great existential cliff. Maybe they end up discovering that at the center of it all, is a silent empty space, surrounded by masks and held together by fears and desires. Would this be more empowering or disempowering?

Perhaps the horror, the sense of emptiness and meaninglessness would be overwhelming. Or, perhaps, there would be an understanding of the infinite possibilities this situation permits. Can’t masks be taken up and cast off, as suits one? If we are not our masks, not our fears and not our desires, then we are as protean, as infinitely adaptable as that see of shape shifters. Even more so, they were constrained to the limits of a liquid - but our core of silent emptiness is not constrained at all.